blamebrampton: 15th century woodcut of a hound (Default)
blamebrampton ([personal profile] blamebrampton) wrote2012-08-25 01:10 am
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Ah HA!

FANFICCERS!

Worried about lack of reviews?

Sad that everyone is reading everyone who is not you?

Depressed to see teenagers who don't know how to spell frottage and cannot accurately gauge the bendability of the average penis with thousands of ffnet reviews while your finely crafted and beautifully edited masterpieces are lucky to garner 23?

FRET NO LONGER!

THE SECRET IS REVEALED!

''People say it isn't good quality but you have to remember Fifty Shades started as fan fiction and as fan fiction you have to have action,'' Hayward says. ''You have to have a sex scene in every chapter because that's how you get your reviews. The amount of people who review per chapter shows popularity, that's how your ratings get up. In fan fiction every chapter has to give you something to keep you reading it.''
(From an SMH interview with Amanda Hayward, the really rather brilliant publisher of the not as brilliant book.)

So there you go! You lot who've been telling me to porn it up were right all along! (I mean, obviously I'm not going to, but that's for the best. The Bad Sex Awards longlist is already inches thick.)

I thoroughly recommend the article, which is interesting and respectfully written, without being actually nice about bad writing. It includes this gem from The London Review of Books' Andrew O'Hagan, which I had previously missed: ''It's not that Fifty Shades of Grey and E.L. James's other tie-me-up-tie-me-down spankbusters read as if feminism never happened: they read as if women never even got the vote.''

[identity profile] blamebrampton.livejournal.com 2012-08-25 01:55 am (UTC)(link)
I agree about the need to have a spectrum of fic. I'm the worst person in the world about helping it along, though: I'm not just bad at reviews, I'm bad at actually reading the things I have bookmarked. I should just stick them on my ereader and be diligent about going back to the source to comment later.

Writing for ourselves is the only guarantee of happiness, because even if it goes Pffft on the popular reception front, we can give honest answers to that little internal critic that asks if it was our best effort and if we're proud of it. That's worth a surprising amount!

And it's done by Furr in Newtown. They do lovely work! I've only had layers once before in the 80s and it was grim, but these are just choppy and modern, and the pink stripe is both fun and a flattering colour, even though I would never have picked it myself. It lifts the hair more than the old red stripes and is less harsh than the white stripe I was thinking of :-) Admittedly: totally Punk Lite.